Part 3: Motherhood, The Falling in Love Part
a journal entry on learning love, forgetting time
There is the high side of love, and there is a non-love masked as love that is compulsive, obsessive, enmeshed, emotionally incestuous. I’ve known both in my family. Shadow and light.
The love I am getting to know now is the pure one. I can feel its divinity. It is not personal. It shatters the “I”. It demolishes the “Self.” It is a love that is hours and hours of devotion to love, and to another.
We have been together for one thousand four hundred and forty hours, my daughter and I. That is not counting the pregnancy. These two months, these 1,440 hours are more time than I have spent with most. That is about 180 eight hour days spent with someone you love, staring into their eyes, holding their body. How surreal that is.
Twenty four hours a day of awareness on her. Twenty four hours a day where I am thinking of her. Even if she is with her dad in the other room I feel her. My breasts sense her. I am attuned to her. And this may continue (or so I have heard) until the day I die.
This is my spiritual practice and it has just begun.
When I look at her it hurts. It hurts to stare at her little hands laying on my chest. Sunlight spills onto the linen covered bed in dancing shadow patterns that mimic the Spanish Moss’s wispy threads that dangle in the tree outside the window.
Time has changed. I don’t know it so well anymore.
I know the line of grey sweeping across my auburn locks.
I know the temperature dropping into a Florida cold front that tells me winter is here.
I know the pink blossoms on the bush outside our window. First there were two, and now the bush is covered with a bright fuchsia.
I know the Brian Eno and Phillip Glass albums I play in the morning as she naps on my chest.
I know the warm pink haze of the salt lamp on all night as I listen to her breath at midnight, then two am, then three, then at four I sleep, then perhaps she is placed on my chest at 5:30, and then again at 8. This two and half hour stretch where she is with her papa feels like an eternity where I miss her skin and the way she purses her lips when she is sleeping or gets annoyed at us when we pet her while she sleeps. Her little grunts that speak volumes about who she is. The little coos she makes as she tries to speak to us. Her wailing cry that slices me in two.
I am afraid to fall too much in love with her. I do not want to smother her, I do not want to need her. But the love that is springing forth from my heart is my own. She is simply the most glorious precious key to it’s unlocking. I takes great practice to let myself love and be loved like this. It is not always easy. It comes with guilt (why me? Why not some of the amazing women I know?) and fear (will it end?) and more guilt (its not fair I get this…) and then I shush those voices, for this is my human journey, one of the most primal ones offered to me, this becoming, that I am amidst of, this becoming a mother.
My new book DARE TO FEEL: THE TRANSFORMATIONAL PATH OF THE HEART comes out January 16th with Sounds True! Pre-order it here and support my work. Means a lot to me as an author. Thank you.
Yesssssssss ❤️
🫶🏼💘